JUST EAST OF NOWHERE
BY SCOT LEHIGH ‧ RELEASE DATE: JULY 11, 2023
"Just East of Nowhere makes it onto the best-seller list in Portland!"
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"Just East of Nowhere makes it onto the best-seller list in Portland!" 〰️
In Lehigh’s debut coming-of-age novel, a young man in small-town Maine grapples with his troubling temper and the painful secret of his origins.
Dan Winters is fresh out of juvenile prison after nine years,and his mother has died while he was inside. She was a strict, God-fearing woman who was often marginalized by the people of Eastport for being one of the town’s “holy rollers.” Dan had a complicated relationship with his late mother and has never known his father. He dreams of a larger, freer life, but he’s tormented by a rage he can’t understand; his brutalization of his classmate Griff Kimball was what originally landed him in juvenile prison. As Dan continuously explores the fraught truth of his family history, a layered story of deception, revelation, and all resultant grief takes shape; for example, he learns from news clippings that his father, ex–U.S. Navy officer Lester Fortin, was convicted of sexually assaulting his mother when she was 17. Interspersed are scenes of troubled relationships and the delusions of adolescence, crafting a rich narrative landscape of Downeast Maine. Lehigh’s fast-paced novel presents an unsettling but earnest portrait of toxic masculinity and the affinities that form between isolated individuals in the midst of terrible violence. Suffused with images of “brick homes sat like Monopoly houses on narrow lots,” and the “sandy, silvered edge” of northern waters, the novel is precise in its construction of mood and place. The work can sometimes lack clarity and fluidity due to its ambitious timeline, set in the past and nearer present. Nonetheless, this novel presents a vivid image of people left behind.
An atmospheric and often raw drama.
Kirkus Reviews
A Boston Globe reporter returned to his youth in Eastport for debut novel
August 2, 2023
Lehigh moved to Eastport with his parents and three siblings in the late 1960s, after living all over the country including upstate New York, Washington state, Idaho and, in Maine, Deer Isle. At the time, Eastport was still dominated by the sardine canning industry, though that too was in decline — the last cannery would close in 1983, and between 1900 and 1970, Eastport lost more than half its population. Though today it benefits from tourism dollars and a small summer population, like other Washington County towns, it struggles.
Lehigh’s portrait of the hardscrabble beauty of Down East Maine — its rugged coastline and its equally rugged people — feels lived in, raw and real, full of lyrical descriptions of a place that is once dazzlingly beautiful and yet suffocating for people who aspire to greater things.
It’s interspersed with moments of shocking violence, as its central characters work through both the challenges of navigating their teens and the generational trauma that has irrevocably scarred their lives. Anyone who grew up in a small Maine town will likely recognize many of the themes and types of people that Lehigh explores in “Just East.”
“I think with small towns, it can be incredibly hard to escape the kind of pull they have,” Lehigh said. “It’s kind of seductive, and yet it can be so claustrophobic. I wanted to convey that.”
Lehigh said that he found it challenging to reconcile his journalistic instincts with the creative freedom of fiction writing. Even when writing a work of fiction, he was compelled to quote his characters accurately — even if every word that came out of their mouths was created by him.
“It’s funny how hard it can be to turn off that instinct and give yourself the freedom to tell the story that way,” Lehigh said. “I think because I don’t come from the literary world, there were lots of things I just didn’t know about the process. But there are other strengths that come from all these years spent writing for newspapers.”
Today, Lehigh splits his time between Boston and Cape Elizabeth, and still visits the Eastport area when he can. He said he has many more ideas for novels waiting to be explored.
“I have started and stopped so many things over the years,” he said. “I want to dig some of them out and see what story to tell next.”
Scot Lehigh has spent nearly 40 years writing about Massachusetts politics, most of it for the Boston Globe, where he’s been a reporter and columnist for decades. Over the years, he’s covered countless political campaigns — from the 2022 race that saw Maura Healey elected as the state’s first female governor, to former governor Michael Dukakis’ 1988 failed presidential campaign, for which Lehigh was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
But when it came time for Lehigh to finally finish one of the novels he’d started and stopped over the years, he returned to a place that has occupied his thoughts since he was a teenager: Eastport, where he lived between the ages of 11 and 18.
“Eastport doesn’t really feel like home to me anymore, and yet, I go back to it in my mind — and specifically my high school years — all the time,” said Lehigh, who graduated from Shead High School in 1976. “It still feels very vivid to me.”
“Just East of Nowhere,” Lehigh’s debut novel, came out last month via Islandport Press, and tells the story of Dan Winters, a troubled young man from Eastport who was recently released after nine years in juvenile prison for assaulting a classmate. In a story that flashes back and forth between the past and the present, Dan and the other central characters begin to understand the personal trauma that has shaped their lives — and the lives of other townsfolk in Eastport.
“Just East of Nowhere,” by Scot Lehigh (Islandport) hit the top-selling Top Ten in Portland, according to the Portland Press Herald, clocking in at #9
Reviews
—New York Times bestselling author Richard North Patterson
“From its absorbing first pages, Just East of Nowhere is fast-paced and tautly written, with the atmospheric pungency of hardscrabble Maine. Better yet is its narrative of complex characters trapped in a chain of miscalculation, mischance, and fateful silences, headed by a sensitive but troubled young man whose search for a father reveals a terrible secret. This is a terrific novel.”
—Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine
“Every page of Just East of Nowhere is a big surprise. There’s no predicting what anyone will do because there are no black or white hats. Everyone is a wriggling, writhing critter of complexity and life is a full-blown storm at sea.”
—William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts and author of Stillwater
“Scot Lehigh’s novel Just East of Nowhere is a haunting and intricately plotted tale of growing up poor on the rugged coast of Maine with nowhere else to go. The frustration of Lehigh’s characters is palpable, and the book builds to an explosive ending. Taking its place in a long line of North American novels dealing with the destiny of place, Just East of Nowhere has hints of Faulkner, of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and of John Casey’s Spartina, which introduced America to the world of small fishing towns on the coast of Rhode Island and won the National Book Award for fiction. Lehigh has a distinctive voice -- one worth listening to."
—Sandra Shea, author of The Realm of Second Hand Souls
“Beautifully captures the rhythms and tangled histories of small-town life, both particular to Maine and universal at the same time. This taut and heartfelt story examines the collision of grief and violence – and what it takes to navigate the winding path to redemption. "
—Alexander Parsons, author of In the Shadows of the Sun
“Just East of Nowhere is a spare and observant coming-of-age story that Scot Lehigh has imbued with a strangely timeless quality, one with the resonance of allegory. Young Dan Winters, college student and criminal, stands at the threshold of adulthood, immobilized by the tension between his past and present, drawn home for his mother’s wake. Returned to his small hometown of Eastport, we feel the powerful echo of past eras, of past generations who struggled similarly to take their measure in the stark and narrow confines of what they know weighed against all that they don’t. Lehigh’s leanly plotted debut is warmed by his empathy and the deep familiarity of lived experience, gifting us a propulsive and sharply characterized tale that for all of its suspense holds the stillness of profundity.”